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Review: Resistance 3

Last Stand

The last couple of chapters don’t fit with the rest of the campaign. The section feels exactly like the final areas that were played in the last two games. When you finish the objective, the game just ends, which is disappointing considering how awesome the campaign is to that point. You don’t fight an important Chimeran leader or have any sort of massive battle. It felt like the game was building up to something amazing but fizzled out. The ending is incredibly underwhelming. It’s rushed, anti-climatic and laughably bad. There’s no sense of closure. The credits provide a feel good moment but make absolutely no sense considering the background and storyline of Resistance 3. The entire game and its ending don’t give any answers to questions about the series, which is my main problem with Resistance 3.

Loose ends such as the Pure Chimera, Gray Tech, the alien race that defeated the Chimera millions of years ago, the Cloven and others from the first two games simply aren’t answered, and barely addressed. These are hinted at in journals but never flushed out in cut-scenes or character dialogue. Furthermore not even the ending to Resistance 2 is actually explained. Considering the series has built to this point for five years, why is there not even an attempt at putting these points into Resistance 3?

Eventually somebody needs to answer these questions. These need to be answered in the game. Not in a series of books, a podcast, live developer chatroom, exclusive interview or any other outside medium. You can’t keep stringing along players betting on them being there for the next installment. There’s not even much to work with in terms of a Resistance 4 because of this game’s ending. Insomniac probably won’t be developing the next game, which could change the direction of the entire story arc. Who knows if the big mysteries of the Resistance universe will ever be answered? If Insomniac knew this was going to be its last Resistance game, the studio should have at least tried to fill out some of the series’ question marks.

A few glitches happened during my play-through. One character wouldn’t move and open a door so I could advance to the section. In one home I got stuck in the attic and couldn’t escape. The game began to bug out and the house would disappear every few seconds. I had to kill myself to restart from the checkpoint. During a boss fight I couldn’t destroy its sensitive spot no matter how much ammo I wasted, so I had to restart the whole thing.

Once you complete the campaign you unlock “Superhuman” difficulty, the highest in the game. Superman is only for the hardcore Resistance players who can face the extreme challenge. Earning Trophies and online awards gives you credits. With credits you can buy cheats like infinite ammo, behind-the-scenes videos, artwork, and player customizations for online multiplayer.

Join the Militia

There’s no squad-based cooperative mode missions like in Resistance 2. These have been taken completely out of the sequel. Instead in Resistance 3 you can play through the story campaign online with another person, which fans have requested since the release of the first game.

An Online Pass is needed to play the campaign online with a friend. It has to be a friend on your PlayStation Network list, because there’s no search function to join a game with a random player. Your partner plays as John Harper, a resident of Capelli’s Oklahoma group. In the game a green shadow will surround your co-op partner so you always know where they are. When your partner dies you can revive them before time runs out. If one partner fully dies you have to restart at the last checkpoint.

There’s a few annoying online co-op bugs. Sometimes one player won’t be able to open a door once their partner goes through it. The game is supposed to automatically reunite the players but it’ll glitch and won’t happen. The only way to get both players together is to restart the game. Several times voice chat randomly stopped, so only one player could hear the other person talking. There were a few instances where accepting a game invitation caused the PS3 to lock up. The player is forced to restart the console.

There’s also local split-screen co-op, which isn’t as good because it’s based in an annoying horizontal view. Still, co-op makes the campaign a bit easier and it’s great to play along with a partner.

Global Resistance

Resistance: Fall of Man had a fantastic multiplayer. Resistance 2‘s competitive online modes attempted in vain to mimic Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. There were also too many players on the maps with too much action going on. My first reaction was that the multiplayer in Resistance 3 was bad. After playing it extensively, I still feel the same way.

There’s a handful of online game modes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Chain Reaction, Breach, Capture the Flag, War Games and Classic Hardcore, with each game lasting two rounds. In team modes up to 16 players can compete. War Games is just a random mix of all the game’s objective modes.

Deathmatch features eight players fighting to reach 30 kills or 3,000 points within 10 minutes. Small Deathmatch has a limit of four players. Team Deathmatch is one of the game’s best online modes. The mode is your standard team battle. The teams have 10 minutes to reach 10,000 points. Originally the mode had a 10 minute limit with no score cap, and the team with the highest score would win. Insomniac broke the score limit with a previous patch, accidentally restricting it to 5,000. With that limit games would end in 2-3 minutes. The score limit has since been raised to 10,000, making for a better experience.

In Chain Reaction, the goal is to take control of several capture points. Once a team controls them all, they can initiate a launch pad. The Chimera try to open a wormhole while the humans want to bring in an airstrike. Each team has 100 reserves. The game can end fairly quickly if a team immediately racks up the capture points, which is its main drawback. Chain Reaction is probably the best objective game because it provides a lot of action and a good challenge. Once it gets going Breach is another decent mode. Players must either defend or destroy nodes on the map. Those who have to destroy the nodes have 80 reserves. The players who have to destroy the reactors are at a big disadvantage because you have to stop 3-4 nodes with only a limited number of lives. It may seem like a lot, but 80 reserves goes by fast. Camping is also a huge problem in Breach, especially from high-ranked players.

By achieving a certain number of kills, using different perks or completing certain objectives while playing you can unlock ribbons and medals. This is one of the better parts of the multiplayer. Who doesn’t like collecting these types of rewards? There’s a lot of them to earn so it gives players a motivation to keep playing. It’s always interesting to earn ribbons after a near-death or defending an objective during a close game.

The multiplayer is a chaotic mess. Often it’s impossible to even tell what’s going on. There’s nothing wrong with a crazy multiplayer, but not if technical issues and poor design choices are the cause.

Right now there’s several problems with the online multiplayer that I don’t see being fixed any time soon. Lag is one of the major annoyances, especially during team-based games. Resistance 3 has the typical online lag problems. Then there’s a deeper layer of lag. If there’s an intense firefight with grenades, explosions and turrets constantly going off, the entire battle screeches to a standstill. This is especially true in team-based games. There’s also frame-rate problems when you’re killed. You’ll be shooting someone and then suddenly be at the respawn menu with no understanding of what just happened. Many times you can even see under the game map right after you die.

It didn’t lag this bad in Resistance 2 when there were 60 players in a game. Now there’s only 16 players and it’s like you’re playing on an AOL dial-up connection. The game even lags when trying to mute players in the start menu. Often the lag was so incredibly bad that I would just start laughing. Many times the game is simply unplayable because of the horrendous lag.

Resistance 3’s matchmaking is unbalanced and broken. You’ll constantly face high-level players 30-60 ranks above you. In one game I played, the other team was filled with insane players. Even though Resistance 3 has only been out a short time, one guy had more than 15,000 kills and four days worth of play time. That’s almost 100 hours of online play. How can new players compete with that?

Games will constantly start without the right number of players in the lobby. During one game I was set up with three other beginning players below rank five. The other team was completely filled with players rank 40 and higher. It was four versus seven. Another game started with only two players on the other team, while my team had eight people. This is a problem in Resistance 2 that was never fixed, so I doubt it will get fine-tuned in this game. Many times you’ll be thrown into games that are about to end or that have already finished. Sometimes team-based games will start with a crazy number of reinforcements, like four billion for a team and 400,000 on the other. There’s no choice but to quit the game, otherwise it’ll never end. There doesn’t appear to be any penalty for quitting games early, so people will just leave the game if things aren’t going their way. Even if everyone on the other team quits the game, your team will still be able to capture objectives. The game won’t end.

Resistance 3 is absolutely brutal on new players. Since the matchmaking is broken, high-level players will dominate those below them because they have all the best weapons and abilities. It takes forever to unlock new weapons and abilities in Resistance 3. There’s an extreme gap between the initial unlocks and new abilities. New players are stuck with the most basic weapons and abilities while those at high-ranks have superior options.

When you first start playing you’re confined to a generic set up of the Carbine or Bullseye. Custom load outs unlock as you rank up, allowing for deeper personalization. These can be selected in-game at any time. However you really can’t add better weapons or abilities until after playing several long hours. Only then will you get the Marksman or Rossmore. Most of the unlocks require players becoming rank 20 or higher. The basic abilities can be easily countered by high-level players. For example the bubble shield, a protection ability, is an early unlock, but the EMP grenade to destroy is earned at rank 25. Are players going to stick around for 10-15 hours just to earn decent perks so they don’t get slaughtered online? Probably not.

Weapon balancing doesn’t exist. If it does, you won’t notice. Team games consist of high-rank players continually shooting the Wildfire rocket launcher near objectives you need to capture. The Wildfire is pretty much an instant kill. Not only does this ruin any chance to win, the weapon makes the entire game lag and slow down. The Wildfire needs to be taken out of the game because it’s so incredibly unfair to use. It’s very hard to counter because its explosion covers the screen and it has a wide range of damage. The Atomizer kills you in about two seconds and is one of the cheapest weapons in multiplayer. All the high-ranked players abuse it to achieve the top killstreaks. In typical online FPS fashion the shotgun is overpowered. Even worse, it has an unlockable ability to engulf the other player in flames.

The game’s many perks ruin Resistance 3’s online multiplayer. These supplementary abilities do way more damage than the actual weapons or a player’s skill. The Leapers perk is one of the worst I have ever seen. It’s like the martyrdom ability from Modern Warfare taken to the extreme, and basically rewards players for dying. When you kill someone, little bugs burst out of their body and attack you. If you’re near them the Leapers follow you around and can take more than 50 percent of your health off. The Leapers can be upgraded to spit acid and become more aggressive. The Leapers are always all over the map. You’ll be trying to kill your opponent and instead get finished off by Leapers from another player that died several kills beforehand.

Leapers are an aggravating thing to deal with. All the low-rank players use it because there’s no other perks to activate at those levels. Turrets, a level 38 unlock, will kill you in a matter of seconds. The turrets can shoot rockets and rapid fire machine guns. Without fail every game will be filled with turrets around the level. Of course, high-level players will put 4-5 turrets around objectives or near spawn points. The turrets contribute a lot to the distortion and confusion of the multiplayer because there’s way too much happening on the screen. Turrets are so cheap and annoying that it completely ruins the game you’re in.

Another thing copied from Call of Duty is killstreaks, although there’s only a handful of them in Resistance 3. At three kills you unlock an assault shield for humans and invisibility for Chimera. The Auger is a six killstreak perk, but the Wildfire is a weapon you can unlock at level 40. This makes no sense whatsoever considering how powerful the Wildfire is. It should be a killstreak, not a permanent weapon. The only thing Resistance 3 didn’t seemingly copy from Call of Duty is that the melee system doesn’t kill a player in one hit.

Classic Hardcore mode eliminates the problems with the abilities, but no one plays it. This mode is similar to the first Resistance’s multiplayer. You’ll have an easier time actually finding a game in Resistance: Fall of Man than you will in Hardcore mode. Classic Hardcore also doesn’t have a specific mode search, so you can’t choose to play Capture the Flag or Deathmatch.

There’s not even a clan system in multiplayer. All players can do is put a clan tag next to their PSN name. There’s no clan lobbies, search functions or clan battle game modes. There’s not many character skins to customize your player. A lot of them can’t even be unlocked in the multiplayer but through the game’s website by playing a real-time strategy Resistance game. You can also put titles next to your name, but a majority of them are bad and it’s hard to navigate the tiny menu to find the title you want. Resistance 3 has its own “Presitge Mode” like Call of Duty called “Remnant.” Remnant mode is unlocked at level 60. By choosing to Remnant players lose their weapons and abilities and start back at level Remnant 1.

Most of my time playing online was in frustration. It’s no fun having to deal with horrible lag, terrible matchmaking, crappy abilities and being at an unfair advantage against high-ranked players. After we lost a game filled with awful lag and perk abuses, an English player on my team said, ‘What a load of rubbish.” That thought sums up the Resistance 3 online experience.

One Response to “Review: Resistance 3”

Resistance could have been game of the year, if it wasnt for the Multiplayer. Although, in my opinion, the ending was WAY better than Bioshock, it was anti-climatic and that is what sort of killed the whole campaign almost.